Giuseppe Cades, Achilles in his Tent with Patroclus, Playing a Lyre, surprised by Ulysses and Nestor, 1782, Louvre Museum.

Seth Benardete, “Achilles and the Iliad” quoted by Belacqui.

Achilles in the ninth book is found “pleasing his heart with the clear-toned lyre and singing the famous deeds of men” (klea andrōn); wheres Aeneas, before disclaiming his genealogy to Achilles, remarks that “we know each other’s lineage and have heard the famous words of mortal human beings” (prokluta epea thnētōn anthrōpōn). Deeds are done by andres, words are spoken by anthrōpoi; and if human beings do anything, it is only the tillage of the fields. The heroes’ contempt for speeches is but part of their contempt for anthrōpoi, and yet they depend on them for the immortality of their fame. Anthrōpoi are the descendants of andres, the shadows, as it were, that the heroes cast into the future, where these poor copies of themselves live on; and as the adulation they will give would seem to justify their own existence, it is proper that these later generations, extolling the heroes beyond their worth, should look on them as demigods: so the word hēmitheoi occurs but once, in a passage on the future destruction of the Achaeans’ wall, and not accidentally it is coupled there with andres (hēmitheōn genos andrōn).

Wouldn’t you be annoyed?

Adaptation Environmental Services is tagging 12-20 prairie rattlesnakes [Crotalus viridus], tracking “their movements, behavior, home range sizes and areas of ecological importance.” Denver Post

Chateau Heartiste, one of those unabashedly politically incorrect Alt-Right blogs, has the story of a car jacking in Baltimore.

In March of this year, I was attacked by a shining example of Diversity! (Inc.) in Baltimore, Maryland. I had returned to my car after having a few drinks with friends in a recently gentrified artsy fartsy part of town– don’t ever let that fool you in Baltimore or any other major city with a significant black population where recently converted ghettos may have been sold to productive human beings for fire-sale real estate prices. There is no part of this city where a “good” neighborhood is less than 500 to 1000 meters from a slice of Mogadishu. Predators learn the travel patterns of its prey. I see it every day when I drive to work through Liberty Heights and other squalid hells. Since the attack I moved to Annapolis, the last big town in Maryland not connected to the others by way of subsidized transportation in the form of the Light Rail network, Amtrack-MARC lines, or regular bus shipments of the third world. To live in Annapolis largely means to work elsewhere, and to work elsewhere means to have the capacity to own, register, inspect, and insure a private motor vehicle for which you are responsible for maintaining. The automobile may be our salvation if we let the cattle cars crumble, as at least then we can largely immobilize the third world into their respective islands whilst we build walls around them with the machine gun sectors pointed in.

Diaries and selfies revealing the life of ISIS fighters. BBC

Bret Stevens contends that we are living in a time of broken politics because the Left petulantly refuses to face the reality that its ideas have all failed.

[T]he Left is playing a new game which involves trying to mentally separate the concepts of “neoliberalism” from the rest of the Left. They do not want to own the disaster they created, so they came up with a scapegoat: capitalism. In Leftist symbolic reality, capitalism took over the Left and created “neoliberalism,” where True Leftists resisted.

Perhaps the bigger story is that they do not want to point out that they created a managerial society, applying the tactics of business and the military toward ordering people around. This is what the Left do, because they are oriented toward control, or everyone doing the same things all the time so that those in power are secure.

This is typical of the one-dimensional categorical order in which Leftists think. To them, there are the True Believers who know what is right and must be done, and then the masses who must be ordered around. Instead of a hierarchy with multiple levels, for them there are only the controllers and the controlled.

Their strategy is utilitarianism, which is the opposite of having purpose. Utilitarians ask people what will make them happy, and people respond with short-term answers, scapegoats, justifications and the other products of the usual flow of neurotic insanity. They never connect the dots and see that having a thriving, stable civilization is what they need, and everything else are personal problems that they as individuals need to fix. Government cannot do that.

First preview episode of a new YouTube video series in which seven native speakers teach immigrants to Britain how to speak Cockney, Scottish, Scouse, Welsh, Wes Country, Yorkshire, and Geordie.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

The Tab has examples of the naughty jokes posted in a private Facebook group that led to ten students admitted to the Harvard Class of 2021 having their admissions rescinded.

We learn, too, that the authorities at Harvard found out about the offending postings in the first place because a number of fellow future Harvard classmates tattled to the Admissions Office.

Wow! Maybe having one’s admission rescinded and not attending college for four years with certain sanctimonious little shits isn’t such a misfortune after all. Me, if I were running that Admissions Office, I’d have rescinded the admissions of all the little sneaks who ratted out their classmates.

Wyatt Hurt, another member of the Class of 2021, said: “I wasn’t surprised by the actions of the administration and I thought that they were the right actions to take. Other students I’ve talked to, from Harvard and otherwise, all generally agree that it was the right action as well.

“Harvard is one of the schools that is shaping the leaders of the future – it’s absolutely a privilege to attend, and when those students posted such hateful material it became clear that they weren’t honoring that privilege.

“As far as how administration found out, I know that a few other admitted students sent screenshots to the admissions office.”

———————

Apart from our contemporary era’s loss of consciousness of the sense of loyalty and group solidarity that, in the past, would have regarded informing on a fellow classmate as contemptible and dishonorable, reading all this caused me to reflect once again that the Great Big Brains running our most illustrious Establishment institutions are not only fascist prigs, they are just plain stupid.

The people running the Harvard Admissions Office demonstrably not only lack senses of humor, they clearly do not understand how humor works.

To regard posting memes based upon transgressive humor as a punishable offense, you would have to be taking the joke literally, as an authentic statement of a real proposition or opinion, which is, of course, absurd. Humor works in a variety of ways. One pretty well-known kind of humor is the genre of transgressive humor, a category that would include the “dirty joke.” There is no mystery here. Everyone ought to recognize the kind of jokes I am referring to. Minority and Gay and Left-wing comedians all make very much a specialty of using jokes which cross taboo lines, jokes which violate propriety and conventional bourgeois sensibilities.

This is actually perfectly natural in comedy. One basic way that humor works is by the reversal of the audience’s expectation, what Gilbert & Sullivan, who in their comic operettas amused audiences by having respectable principals humorously disclose the basest and most cynical motivations in song, referred to a Topsy-Turvy-dom. There are all sorts of ways of reversing the audience’s expectation to get a laugh. One can have a cartoon cat chase the dog, the rabbit defeat the hunter, the roadrunner best the coyote again and again. And, another standard technique of humor is to deliberately cross the boundaries of proper language, sexual reference, or propriety. In our own age, in which political correctness is a potent force, violating PC by mocking or expressing negative attitudes toward minority sacred cows is obviously a potential gold mine for improper humor.

When a person tells a travelling salesman joke, it actually does not mean that he literally despises farmers and their daughters, or that he really thinks farmer’s daughters are readily seducible. When someone repeats an ethnic or racial joke, it does not mean that the person literally believes its contents to be true, or that he is a bigot or a racist.

Indulging in improper, off-color humor can be a way of letting of steam, or a way of expressing momentary boredom with the obligations of propriety. It can even be a way of reinforcing group solidarity, by causing members of a group (a bunch of the men at a party or some group of soon-to-be-entering Harvard freshmen) to collaborate in mischievously and covertly violating social norms. This, of course, is why, a few years ago, the DKE initiation at Yale had pledges stand outside the Feminist Center and chant: “No means yes!”

When adult authorities at places like Yale and Harvard routinely mistake mildly rambunctious adolescent speech in obviously humorous contexts for authentic forms of thought crime, I would contend, it demonstrates that levels of both mutton-headed stupidity and sanctimonious self-righteousness on the part of the people running things in those places have risen to intolerable levels.